This well-documented work on surgical history should have as much appeal for the interested lay reader as for the surgeon. By making the narrator an actual eye-witness of nearly all of the more significant events that marked surgical progress in the 19th century, the author has given his narrative much of the interest and excitement of a good novel. His spokesman is a young doctor, with friends and acquaintances in the profession both here and abroad, who grows with the profession until at the end of the book he has seen and participated in the epochal achievements that took place in his lifetime. He was personally acquainted with such giants of surgical growth as Semmelweis, Koch, Lister, and Harvey. Of those whom he did not actually meet he had what amounted to an intimate knowledge through acquaintances they had in common. His descriptions of operations performed without benefit of anesthesia